Wife Seeking Court Protection Is Stabbed : Violence: A hearing over a restraining order had just been moved to an area without metal detectors. The woman’s husband is arrested.

A woman seeking a restraining order against her husband Monday in Van Nuys Superior Court was stabbed six times by her estranged spouse outside the courtroom after the case was moved to an area with no metal detectors, police said.

Authorities said court bailiffs wrestled the knife from the man, A. J. Wells, 33, of Reseda. He was booked on suspicion of attempted murder.

The victim, Shirley Wells, 33, of North Hollywood, said in an interview from her hospital bed at Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills hours after the incident that she had been dreading Monday’s joint court appearance with her husband “because he’s been threatening me and I was worried that he meant it.”

However, the Kaiser Permanente nurse said she felt somewhat secure Monday because the session was to be held in a courthouse protected by metal detectors similar to those used at airports.

“But my heart dropped,” Wells said, when she and two male relatives who accompanied her found a notice on the assigned courtroom, saying that all cases had been transferred to a bungalow adjacent to the main court buildings.

Kenneth Carline, her brother-in-law who accompanied her for protection, said: “We think that’s when he went and got the knife, when he learned just like we did that the court was going to be in one of those outside buildings where there’s no security.”

Carline said that five feet outside the assigned bungalow, A. J. Wells lunged for his wife with what police said was a steak knife, stabbing her five times in the chest and once in the abdomen.

“I thought he was hitting me at first,” Shirley Wells said. “It was a little bit before I realized that he was stabbing me--not till I got a hand on the knife and kind of bent the blade a little.”

Carline said Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies, who serve as court bailiffs, “did their job once the thing got started. They responded OK.”

But both he and Shirley Wells complained that divorce cases should not be transferred to areas without security.

“These are cases with angry spouses, and anything can happen,” the stabbing victim said.

Shirley Wells, who said in the interview that she was in “some pain but I’m going to survive,” said she last saw her husband a month ago when she had him arrested for allegedly assaulting her.

As police drove him away, “he shouted that he was going to kill me,” she said.

Since then, she and the couple’s two daughters, ages 5 and 16, have been hiding from her husband with the help of relatives, she said.

However, her husband contested a restraining order she obtained, she said, and Monday’s hearing was to determine whether that order should be lifted. She had already filed for divorce.

A. J. Wells was being held Monday without bail at the Van Nuys jail, police said.

Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Maslonka, second-in-command of the Van Nuys court security force, said that divorce-related cases were transferred to the bungalow Monday because asbestos was being removed from one of the two rooms in the main Superior Court building.

Usually the bungalows, which are mobile homes on concrete slabs, are used for civil cases, he said, “but sometimes we have to use them for other things. This was one of those times.”

He said that “even with security at the door, we can’t do much to stop a stabbing outside. And a stabbing can happen on the street or in the parking lot.”